Harvey Bennett Mysteries Box Set 3

by Nick Thacker

  Ben looked at his watch, trying to determine how much time had passed. “Did he go away? Why didn’t he try to kill you?”

  "I don't know," Clive said. "He had me — I mean, he kicked me into this gulch, and he had me. He could have easily taken the shot. I must have blacked out or something, but when I woke up, he was gone."

  Ben felt Eliza’s hand on his arm. “Ben,” she said, “he must have heard us shooting back.”

  “Maybe,” Ben said. But the timing didn’t line up. Someone had clearly fired at them while they were in the cave, and Ben was sure he had seen their muzzle flash behind the trees. There was no way that same man had been attacking Clive moments earlier.

  It meant that there had to be more than one attacker.

  “What did this guy look like?” Ben asked. “Big, small, somewhere in between? Did he say anything?”

  Clive shook his head. “He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t even hear him grunt or seem like he was exerting any effort while we fought. But he was big, huge. Kind of hairy, with a beard and mustache. Light brown hair, I think.”

  Ben looked at Eliza. “That’s him, that’s the man who attacked me two nights ago.” He filled Clive in on his own story of being ambushed by the hairy man.

  But that left out another piece of the puzzle, the one Ben had been chewing on before: if the giant bear of a man had attacked Clive out here, then who had been firing at them at the cave?

  Ben was about to pose this question to the group when another gunshot rang out from somewhere behind them. Ben ducked and rolled forward, trying to figure out where he had placed his rifle before helping Clive out of the ditch. Dammit, he thought. I’m getting really sick of being shot at by people I can’t see.

  He crawled over to the tree his rifle was leaning against and saw Clive huddling next to it as well.

  No. Clive wasn't huddling; he was crouching. Trying to cover —

  “They got me,” Clive said softly, under his breath.

  He looked up at Ben, and Ben saw the glistening of moisture beneath Clive's hand, which was covering his chest. He glanced up and saw Clive's mouth still moving, but no words came out. Clive fell back, his back against the tree.

  “Eliza!” Ben shouted.

  “I saw it,” she said. She was right behind Ben, but her voice was bouncing off a tree farther away. Ben knew she was looking in the other direction. Trying to find their attacker.

  A sprinkle of blood fell over the corner of Clive’s lip and caught on his chin. More filled his mouth, and his eyes flickered, widening and narrowing over and over again.

  Ben knew there was nothing in the world he could do for the young man. He felt tears coming to his eyes, felt himself steeling against the rage that would be building inside him shortly after. He didn’t want to deal with this — didn’t want to have to decipher and parse it all and figure out how to tell Clive’s father Olaf that his son had been shot and killed out here.

  It was a selfish, unfair reaction, but it was the only one Ben allowed himself to feel. Anything more and he would begin to empathize with this young man; he would understand and feel what the kid was going through right now. He didn't want to do that; he couldn't bring himself to do that. Later, holed up inside the small hotel room back in Grindelwald, sure.

  But out here, where there was no safety and plenty of things that wanted to kill them, Ben wouldn’t allow himself that emotion.

  He remembered what Eliza had told him about her husband, what she had told him about himself. He would wear this emotion on his sleeve, eventually, but before that, it would be added to the tumultuous mix of feelings and thoughts and reasons, and they would all be turning around in his mind until they collected together into a cohesive, useful solution.

  He knew this, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t want it.

  He watched the young man in front of him die, gasping for his last breath before slumping against the tree, his eyes still open.

  40

  Ben

  “Can you run?” Ben asked.

  Eliza shook her head, slowly at first and then more confidently. “It’s pretty bad, but I guess I’ll have to try, won’t I?”

  “Whoever is shooting at us is still out there somewhere,” Ben said. “And he’s not going to rest, now that he knows where we are. We need to get moving, keep working toward EKG and try to cut him off somewhere near the headquarters.”

  Eliza fidgeted with the crutch she was using, working it around in her hand to find a more comfortable way of holding it. After a few seconds, she placed the end of the stick on the ground and tried putting a bit of pressure on her right leg.

  She winced in pain, but she was able to move a few steps without falling.

  “It will get better the more I keep moving,” she said. Then she laughed. “Actually, I’ll just be making it worse, but it will feel like it’s getting better. By the time we stop, I’ll need to have an icepack.”

  “Well, there’s plenty of ice around. Let’s start moving. You stay in front to set the pace, and I’ll follow behind and make sure there’s no one tracking us.”

  "Okay," she said. She tested her crutch and right leg once more, and Ben was pleased to see that it seemed as though she was able to walk without needing help from him. Hopefully she was right, and her leg would at least feel good enough to move quickly. "Which way?" she asked.

  "We need to move east, but if we follow this ridge southeast, we can hide up in the rocks, like we did earlier. That will help us if you need to rest more."

  “I’ll be fine, I promise. We just need to move, and the more I wait around and think about it, the harder it’s going to be.”

  Ben knew she was right, that by moving toward an objective and having a goal, she could keep her mind off the pain.

  Clive was dead. Ben also knew that they were both trying to ignore the psychological impact of their teammate’s having been shot and killed, murdered right in front of them. Dying in Ben’s arms. He knew they would both have to debrief slowly and methodically over the next few days just to prevent the shock of it all from paralyzing them.

  And based on what he knew of Eliza now, he wasn’t sure she would be able to handle his death without some professional help.

  Ben himself had needed it before, and it never hurt to seek guidance and wisdom and have someone to talk to about it all. He remembered back a few years ago, before the CSO. When he was working at Yellowstone National Park.

  He had needed that professional help quite a bit after seeing one of his coworkers fall into a crevasse and die in front of his eyes.

  That had been the first time, he thought. And it was far from the last.

  Ben had seen enough death in his nearly forty years to last multiple lifetimes. It had started young, in his twenties, when his mind hadn’t even finished fully developing. Since then, he had seen murder, sickness, accidents, and none of the deaths were easy to swallow. It never got easier — he had never gotten to the point where he wanted to welcome death with open arms — but it did get a bit easier to process. His mind had learned to compartmentalize and cope with it slowly over time rather than all at once.

  Clive was far from just a number, far from just one of the people he had seen die on his watch, but Ben knew that his mind would treat it that way. It was the only way through something like this.

  Eliza wouldn’t have that experience; she didn’t have the years of fighting and shooting and death and destruction. She had been through the pain of loss when her husband had passed away, but that didn’t mean she was prepared for all the death they had seen in just the two days they’d been out here.

  He made another note to himself to check in with her — if and when they got to a point where they could actually rest. They needed to push on now, to stay away from this hunter that was following them. Ben still wasn’t sure who was hunting them; he hadn’t gotten a good look at the shooter’s face, but the silhouette seemed male, but not necessarily large enough to be the hairy, broad-shouldered
guy who’d punched him two nights ago.

  If that was the case, he thought, we might need to worry about three parties tracking us out here.

  They knew about Clive's apelike monster — the purportedly twenty-foot-tall gorilla — and they knew about this person trying to shoot at them. And Ben, of course, knew about the aggressive man from his pub encounter, and that man's willingness to use physical force to 'convince them not to be out here.'

  Three different parties, all willing to kill, all dangerous.

  Still, why had Clive’s monster not attacked and then killed them? He had been attacked by the man hunting them, and yet Clive had said that he had seen this silverback gorilla and lived to tell about it.

  Ben had been struggling with this thought for some time, and he was still working it over in his mind. The germ of an idea had begun back at the rocks where he and Eliza had stopped to catch their breath. Clive's death was only one more puzzle piece in the long chain of pieces they had been collecting. He wondered now if the young man's death would be the final piece or at least a step in the right direction. For Clive's sake, he hoped it would at least help them push forward. He hoped it would help them figure this out.

  Ben crouched a bit as he walked behind Eliza, watching her steadily and carefully work through the forest toward the rocky ridge up and to their right. He needed to be alert now more than ever — Clive had already been killed, and Eliza was injured. He had Clive’s pack slung over his shoulder as well as his own, but Eliza wouldn’t allow him to carry hers for her. He would have to shift the gear around and leave one of the packs behind as soon as they found somewhere safe to stay, but he didn’t want to do that here.

  He heard nothing out of the ordinary as they crunched through the old, dry snow, the sticks and the leaves breaking free from their wintry enclosures as he walked. He thought he heard a few squirrels chattering with one another far away, but even the birds had seemed to sense their presence and were cautiously quiet.

  He kept his eyes forward, on Eliza, hoping she wasn’t lying to him and that her knee would hold up for this leg of their journey. She seemed to be okay, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to carry her and all of their gear. He focused on her hobbled walk, unable to ignore her tight, fit figure as it swung back-and-forth. Almost graceful, considering the pain she was probably in.

  He shook his head, trying to push away those undesirable emotions. He had misread her intentions earlier in the cave, and he felt bad for both of them for it. She hadn’t been trying to trick him into flirting with her, nor was she trying to replace her dead husband. He understood a bit of what she was going through, and that didn’t excuse any reciprocal actions on his part.

  More importantly, he needed to stay focused and vigilant to keep them alive. Eliza was strong and smart, and she didn’t need his protection aside for the fact that she was now far more vulnerable than they both would have hoped. He wished she was able to hold a weapon, but he knew their best chance of survival was now getting somewhere where he could defend them both from an attack on only one side rather than a thousand.

  With that in mind, he cinched up the backpack straps on both packs and rechecked the magazine installed in his assault rifle. The pistols — his and Clive’s — were still in their packs, and Ben decided he would have to start wearing his as a backup since he was now the only fighter they had left. As Reggie had always told him, it was faster to switch weapons than it was to reload in the middle of a fight.

  He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  They marched forward, moving slowly, but thankfully faster than Ben had thought they might, and Eliza set their course, heading directly toward the edge of the forest.

  He knew it would be about an hour before they could stop again, but that would put them in range of EKG’s headquarters if all went well. From there they could regroup and make a plan for getting onto the inner grounds of the company.

  He let his mind start to wander but then decided to turn inward once again, to focus on the task at hand and try to put it all together before they got there. Any information they had that hadn't been parsed yet needed to be considered, as any solutions they could bring to one another before they got to EKG would help them immensely in their cause.

  41

  Ben

  Ben and Eliza were able to reach the rocks 45 minutes later — about 15 minutes faster than Ben had expected. Eliza had begun to move much more quickly once the blood in her leg began moving, especially once they were out of the thicker part of the forest and moving over nothing but snow and grass instead.

  He found a spot for them behind a line of large boulders; all tucked up against the edge of the ridge. The ridge itself curled northeast, and they were now on the very tip of it. The whole area overlooked a valley to the left of their position, where they had been previously. To the right was another wooded area, and though he couldn't see it from here, Ben's best guess was that EKG headquarters was somewhere just beyond that stand of trees.

  He helped Eliza shunt her pack and get situated on the ground, where she guzzled down the last of her water and closed her eyes for a moment.

  “How is it treating you?”

  She opened one eye and gave Ben a look that told him everything he needed to know. “It’s terrible,” she said, “but it’s not as bad as it was before. It is numb now, and it doesn’t really hurt much, but it just won’t loosen up. I feel like I can’t walk right, and that I never will again.”

  Ben nodded along as she explained, knowing exactly how she was feeling. “You definitely will be better in a few weeks to a month,” he said, “but it’s going to take a bit of babying it once we’re off this mountain.”

  “I’m just sorry it happened,” Eliza said. “I should be helping more.”

  “Nonsense,” Ben said. “You’re doing just fine. Once we get into EKG and start looking around, I will be way out of my element. I’ll need you more than ever, once we’re in there.”

  She looked off in the distance for a moment, and then back at Ben. “Yeah,” she said, “if we ever get there.”

  “We will. I promise. I’m pretty sure EKG is just down there, past that line of trees. They wanted a remote facility, but they still need it to be accessible for their staff and scientists. I think I remember from the maps that the whole area opens up into a sort of small valley, right? Just like the one we came from. If I were them, that’s where I would put the company. A natural border around it to keep away prying eyes, but it’s also one that’s not inaccessible enough that they couldn’t have paved a road to it for access.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Eliza said. “When can we get moving again?”

  Ben admired her for her effort and determination, but he also knew that to move too fast now could be devastating to the success of the mission. “Let’s take our time. We finally are in a defensible position again, so I can hold off anyone trying to snipe at us. No one’s that good a shot with just a hunting rifle, from that distance, so they’d have to get closer. If anyone pops their head up and tries to rush us, I know I am a good enough shot to get them while they’re out in the open.”

  “I can help,” Eliza said. “If you just give me one of the rifles, I can set it up and use one of these rocks as a —“

  Ben laughed. “Before I give you any weapon again, you’re going through ‘Ben’s basic shooting class,’” he said. “And judging by what I saw earlier, I think we’re all safer without you having a rifle in your hands.”

  She looked at him with a pouty face, but he could see the smile behind her eyes. “Was I that bad?”

  “One of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  “Hey!”

  “Okay, kidding. Maybe not the worst I’ve seen. Everyone needs practice, too. It’s a strange animal, an assault rifle. They’re finicky and don’t really want to be controlled. That first spray shot into the woods probably landed in a circle fifty yards across, but we can get that smaller. Problem is we can’t be wasting ammunition and giving aw
ay our location by taking a bunch of practice shots.”

  "So, what do you want me to do?"

  "I can tell you what I know, just from what I've learned from my friends and some professional shooting instructors. But you can't teach shooting by talking through it, so we'll just have to hope that it will be enough to get us through this week. The best thing you can do from now on is to try as hard as possible not to have to shoot anything at all."

  “That sounds like a pretty good strategy to me,” Eliza said.

  "It's pretty much the only strategy I follow," Ben answered. "Do whatever you can to not have to shoot anything, not to have to even lift your finger off the trigger guard. If you do have to shoot, then by all means wait as long as possible, so it's a can't-miss shot. Let them get right up into the crosshairs, fill them up, so even if you shoot wide or high, you're still hitting something vital, dropping them as quickly as possible."

  “Christ,” she said, “you talk about it like it’s easy. Like we didn’t just see Clive get shot and die in front of us.”

  Ben sat silent for a moment before answering. "Yeah, it is easy to talk about. Now, anyway. But talking about something and thinking about something — and especially acting on it — are all very different things. Trust me, if I could go back and once again make it hard to talk about this kind of stuff, I would. But I've made my bed; I guess I have to lay in it."

  She looked confused. “Is that some American expression or something?”

  “I guess,” he shrugged. “Something my mom used to say. When my brother Zach and I would mess up our rooms, she would always come in and tell us that. It never really made sense in that context though, because Zach and I were always fine sleeping in a cluttered bed, one filled with toys and books.”